For the answers to these and even stranger questions,
click on any of the pictures or questions to
be taken to detailed explanations with more
pictures.

Thomas Crapper, 1836-1910, English plumber and industrialist
but not the inventor of the flush toilet.

Did Thomas Crapper Invent the Flush Toilet?

No, he didn't.
Toilets have been around at least since 3,500 BC, see the
Neolithic toilets of Skara Brae
for an example.
Flushing toilets connected to a common sewage disposal
system existed by 2,600 BC in the Indus Valley and
1,800 in Crete and Thera.

After the Romans left, England went back to filling chamber
pots and flinging the contents out the windows.
Sir John Harington
re-invented the English flush toilet.
There were English patents for flush toilet designs before
Crapper was born, and prominent toilet designers and
and manufacturers by the time he was 15 years old.

As for the word "crap", it dates back to Middle English
meaning rejected material or residue, and the
Oxford English Dictionary reports it being used as coarse
slang for the act or product of defecation in a written work
dating from when Crapper was just 10 years old.

Squat or Sit?

This is the biggest toilet question in the minds of most
international travelers.
And for some, especially Americans, it may be the
biggest question of all, part of what keeps them from
travelling out of fear of the different:
Will I have to deal with squat toilets
in this country?

It turns out that Bulgaria is east of the
Paper Curtain
and you should put your used paper into the waste bin.
Read this page
for the full details on which countries have plumbing
that can handle your paper, where you need to put your
paper into the waste bin, and what do to if neither
is really possible.

When, Where, and Why Were Public Toilets
Segregated by Gender?

Originally, they weren't.
Large public latrines in the Roman-administered Greek world
were shared by men and women.
Artfully draped togas provided all the privacy they
cared about.

Public toilets disappeared with the rest of the infrastructure
as the Western Roman Empire faded out.
Europe had almost no public toilets for the
millennium following the end of the Western Roman Empire.
Large cities had a few garderobes or
houses of easement through the 1400s and 1500s.

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.